Last week I wrote a column about the protests in Westminster over an alleged insult to the flag of what used to be South Vietnam. In the column I was critical of some of the Vietnamese-American protesters’ methods, but I was generally sympathetic to their passion for the symbol of their lost country.

But a number of readers didn’t see it that way.

Some said the protesters need to just get over it. Some said they should forget about the old country and be more grateful for the opportunities America has given them.

And some with ties to Westminster expressed sentiments that I’ve heard again and again over the years – that is, frustration and anger that Vietnamese immigrants have “taken over” a large portion of that city.

That’s an understandable emotion. I would guess that hardly anyone – white, black, Asian, whatever – is overjoyed when his old neighborhood is dominated by new arrivals who put up signs he can’t read and speak a language he can’t understand and have a culture he’s not a part of. You can bet that if through some future historical fluke thousands of Canadian immigrants flocked to Little Saigon and wanted to rename it “Little Ottawa,” the Vietnamese-American community wouldn’t like it, either.

And it’s true that the impact of Vietnamese immigration was sudden and jarring – not only in places like Westminster and Garden Grove but throughout the nation.

According to federal immigration figures, before 1970, fewer than 5,000 Vietnamese had been admitted to the U.S. as permanent residents, many of them the wives or children of U.S. servicemen. Statistically, there was hardly any such thing as “Vietnamese-Americans.”

Obviously, that changed after the fall of South Vietnam to the communist North Vietnamese, an event that culminated exactly 33 years ago this Wednesday. In 1975, some 125,000 Vietnamese came to the U.S. as refugees, followed in subsequent years by wave after wave of “boat people” and other refugees. By 2002, about 760,000 Vietnamese refugees had come to America – and the former typically “American” cities of Westminster and Garden Grove were 31 percent and 21 percent Vietnamese, respectively.

True, many of those refugees had trouble fully assimilating. A 2000 census report showed that 45 percent of Vietnamese households in America were “linguistically isolated” – meaning that no adult spoke English “very well.” About 10 percent of Vietnamese households received “public assistance” that year, about the same as the national average, but way down from 25 percent in 1990. And some younger Vietnamese have become involved in gangs.

Nevertheless, almost 60 percent of foreign-born Vietnamese managed to become naturalized U.S. citizens – a much higher rate than many other immigrant groups.

And although there are exceptions, as a group I have never encountered immigrants who are as consistently and outspokenly grateful to this nation as the Vietnamese refugees.

I was reminded of that the other day when I stopped by the “Freedom Boat” exhibit in Little Saigon. The boat is a small, open-decked wooden fishing boat that was actually used to transport Vietnamese “boat people” fleeing the communist regime decades ago. Even in its prime I would have hesitated to sail such a vessel on a lake, much less sail it onto the boundless sea, crammed with refugees and facing storms and pirates and starvation and thirst.

Madalenna Lai of the Pomona-based Vietnamese Cultural House, who escaped Vietnam by boat in 1975 – her husband remained behind and spent a dozen years in communist prison camps – has been hauling the boat across the country to remind Vietnamese-Americans of their heritage. When the tour is over, she said, she hopes to make the boat the centerpiece of a museum.

And what does she intend to call the museum?

“We want to show how much the Vietnamese community appreciates this country,” she told me. “We want to call it ‘The Thank You America Museum.'”

That’s right. The Thank You America Museum.

Again, that sort of attitude isn’t unusual. I’ve heard the same thing from countless Vietnamese refugees.

Of course, eventually that may change. As they get further away in time from their parents’ or grandparents’ struggles, subsequent generations of Vietnamese-Americans may become just as ungrateful and cynical about this country as so many other Americans seem to be.

But the vast majority of Vietnamese who came here as refugees don’t feel that way.

So yes, maybe their coming shook up some communities. And yes, maybe some of us think that too many of them are caught up in regretting what they lost.

But we should understand that they are also deeply grateful for what they found.

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